It's also a product targetted at technical people, including people working at startups and also large enterprise.
No popups.
When you click the community edition download link -- bam -- it is immediately downloading! No form to fill in.
I don't even use their tools much any more, except for the Rust plugin. Nonetheless, I read through their "what's new" release notes, even for Java, because it is so well presented: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/
Instead they have GIFs showing short, to-the-point snippets of exactly what each feature does. Note that these don't animate by default! You have to click them to play the clip. I love that. They're helpful without being distracting while I'm reading nearby text.
It also gives you an idea of what the product looks like in actual use.
You have no idea how much crap people wade through to find this! I often spend hours googling terms like "Product X Screenshot", "Product X real-world", "Product X tutorial" in the futile attempt to just find out what the heck to expect. Is it a green-screen terminal app kept alive like some sort of crime against nature? Is it a web application? Does it come with a Windows-only GUI? If so, is it at least a usable one? Does it have command-line tools? PowerShell? Tab-complete?
You go to a site like JetBrains, and you see exactly that! Real-world code being manipulated, showing you the product in all its glory.
So show this! Show ScyllaDB doing something. Don't just talk about how it's 47% more snazzy than a competing product I haven't used.
Show it doing a schema change nearly instantly on a terabyte of data, or whatever. But show me the product, or I walk away until I find a website that isn't afraid of letting me see what they're selling...
Good point on the video-first strategy. We're talking more about this internally.
Also: For Scylla Open Source downloads aren't gated -- no name or email address neeeded. We do need to ask what platform you're running on, because the way you deploy to each is different. e.g.,
A good point of comparison is this website: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/
It's also a product targetted at technical people, including people working at startups and also large enterprise.
No popups.
When you click the community edition download link -- bam -- it is immediately downloading! No form to fill in.
I don't even use their tools much any more, except for the Rust plugin. Nonetheless, I read through their "what's new" release notes, even for Java, because it is so well presented: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/
I don't have to sit through an hour-long YouTube video watching some guy introducing some other guy I don't care about for five minutes. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-wadsworth-constant
Instead they have GIFs showing short, to-the-point snippets of exactly what each feature does. Note that these don't animate by default! You have to click them to play the clip. I love that. They're helpful without being distracting while I'm reading nearby text.
It also gives you an idea of what the product looks like in actual use.
You have no idea how much crap people wade through to find this! I often spend hours googling terms like "Product X Screenshot", "Product X real-world", "Product X tutorial" in the futile attempt to just find out what the heck to expect. Is it a green-screen terminal app kept alive like some sort of crime against nature? Is it a web application? Does it come with a Windows-only GUI? If so, is it at least a usable one? Does it have command-line tools? PowerShell? Tab-complete?
You go to a site like JetBrains, and you see exactly that! Real-world code being manipulated, showing you the product in all its glory.
So show this! Show ScyllaDB doing something. Don't just talk about how it's 47% more snazzy than a competing product I haven't used.
Show it doing a schema change nearly instantly on a terabyte of data, or whatever. But show me the product, or I walk away until I find a website that isn't afraid of letting me see what they're selling...